The Bang & Olufsen-powered Spaceshop enables Vollebak to boldly go into the future of retail

It’s a beautiful June evening in Copenhagen. A light breeze drifts across the Nordhavn docks and ruffles the stand of firs and birches that fringe the edges of a new office block rising up at the end of Sundmolen pier. It would be a peaceful scene, but for the unmistakeable sounds of the Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic’ emanating from deep within the building.

Welcome to a product launch of a different kind, courtesy of cutting-edge technical fashion brand Vollebak. Within the concrete walls of this impressive structure there’s a fashionable crowd, swelled by the ranks of the bright young things who work here, as well as some of the city’s finest and most inquisitive minds.

The building is BIG’s HQ, opened just over a year ago to provide the Danish studio with a fittingly bracing lab and location from which to deploy its trademark structural gymnastics and architectural pyrotechnics, courtesy of its wunderkind leader, the iconoclastic Bjarke Ingels.

Our focus is a small silvery craft parked up in the towering atrium, a vehicle that is about to be launched. Yet unlike a conventional rocket launch, there’s no countdown. Nor do we have to retire to a safe distance to avoid the blast.

This is the world debut of the Vollebak Spaceshop, an intriguing hybrid of material innovation, cinematic scope, excessive wattage and naked chutzpah. It’s perfectly on brand for the small but mighty tech-centric clothing company, founded in 2016 by twin brothers Nick and Steve Tidball. Both are here tonight, overseeing their next step into the future.

The Vollebak Spaceshop is a fusion of material science, out-of-this-world design and pure retail theatre. Designed by Copenhagen-based Saga Space Architects, the Spaceshop is essentially a retail concept on steroids (‘an ice cream truck on crack’, according to Nick Tidball), intended to be deployed around the world as the ultimate evolution of the pop-up shop.

It’s making its debut here in Copenhagen thanks to several solid Danish connections. For a start, there’s Vollebak’s ongoing work with Ingels. A few years ago, Nick approached the architect out of the blue to help shape a potential island retreat. They got on famously, although the project itself – a proposal for a ‘Vollebak Island’ off the coast of Nova Scotia – hasn’t yet made it off the drawing board. I wouldn’t bet against it.

Significantly, there’s another Great Dane in the mix. The other dimensional bass that fills the BIG HQ is provided by one of the most admired names in audio, Danish legends Bang & Olufsen. Instead of rockets, the Spaceshop packs more than 12,000 watts of power, courtesy of four Beosound 2 speakers at the front and four Beolab 5 ‘boosters’ at the rear. Total output? Well over 12,000 watts and around 120 decibels. That’s not the kind of noise you want to be around for long (although the launch of Nasa’s Saturn V generated sounds of this magnitude at a distance of 1.5 miles).

All this power makes for a great party, even if it won’t get you into orbit. Spaceshop’s mission is of a different kind, to create the dazzling glow of publicity as it introduces Vollebak to new territories and new customers.

Mission designer Saga Space Architects is also based in Copenhagen. The consultancy firm, co-found by designer Sebastian Aristotelis, has very real space credentials – it works on lighting modules for the ISS and habitat designs for astronaut training. The Spaceshop, however, is more of a flight of fancy, albeit a highly informed one.

Carrying more than a hint of the craft from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, or the video games Elite and Wing Commander, the Spaceshop is science fiction brought to life. Designed to slot into a standard shipping container, the craft is smaller in person than in pictures, especially when one considers the awe-inspiring scale of science fiction's most memorable ships, let alone the unimaginably empty void of space.

Whether or not Saga will be first in line as designers of the interstellar fleet of the future, as Nick seems convinced, is another matter. As it stands, the Spaceshop certainly fulfils its brief as an alien object that can touch down in any city around the world, loudly announce its presence and open up to display the clothing of tomorrow.

The original brief was simple – imagine a craft designed to resupply a Moon or Mars colony of the future. For Saga, whose interest lies in the infrastructure of space rather than the science of rocketry, Vollebak offered an opportunity to blend pure engineering with theatricality.

There are real, ongoing collaborations here, as well as the kind of materials science beloved by the Tidballs and their approach to clothing design. How did B&O get involved? Again, serendipity played a part. Tidball describes finding a sample of the company's anodised aluminium in a materials library and being intrigued by its rough, weathered texture, as if it had the patina of use.

‘It started as a happy accident,’ says Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre, B&O’s creative director of design. ‘We originally wanted a deep black surface, but something happened with the process that we didn’t understand.’ Could this be applied to a speaker? ‘It does actually look like something that’s been in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere,’ Krab-Bjerre admits, ‘we have perfected the imperfection.’

The result is a limited edition of the Beosound 2, similar in ethos to Bang & Olufsen’s recently launched Atelier service, only this time no two speakers are alike.

At this point, the stars aligned. Nick Tidball’s dream of a ‘spaceshop’, rather than a regular pop-up, became inextricably linked to the B&O edition when it was decided to include speakers in the sci-fi design. ‘The way Vollebak work with materials is very similar to what we do,’ says Krab-Bjerre. ‘Maybe they’re more expressive than how we were in the past, but we’re certainly becoming more daring.’

The surface of the Spaceshop is made from anodised aluminium, a process undertaken in Bang & Olufsen’s own workshops in Struer, about 270km to the west. Having agreed to anodise the panels of the Spaceshop itself, Krab-Bjerre found himself in the midst of complex logistics as bits of the installation went back and forth between Denmark’s west and east coasts.

So should we forget drop-shipping and try spaceshopping instead? This mission isn’t just about raising profiles and selling product. Nick Tidball sees the anodisation process as just one way of making clothing smarter. ‘Inevitably, over the next ten to 30 years, fabrics will be bathed in substances to give them different properties,’ he explains. ‘Our early material explorations lead you to the science. There are things like shielding fabrics that resist phone signals – we’re in the early zone of experimentation around conductivity.’

Pointing out that cotton has been used for 3,000 years, whilst nylon and polyester have been around for just over a century, Tidball explains how he wants Vollebak to operate on the fringes of material and fabric science.

To that end, the Spaceshop’s initial cargo includes Vollebak’s Martin Aerogel Jackets, constructed using the hypersonic parachute fabric created to land Nasa's Perseverance rover, as well as its ‘Full Metal Jackets’ made from copper thread (11km per jacket).

Launched alongside the speaker and Spaceshop is a small batch of new anodised jackets, available in red and grey. In keeping with the Vollebak philosophy, these began with an aesthetic and might ultimately end up with an application. ‘You put [one] on, and you feel like you’re in the original Blade Runner,’ Tidball enthuses. ‘It’s a material experiment – we’re trying to give birth to multi-decade ideas.’

The Spaceshop is a project that embraces all the facets of a modern multi-modal campaign, something that exists across social, physical, audio and visual media. In weaving together high-end brands with music, starchitects and science fiction, Vollebak is pushing boundaries both real and imagined.

For Saga's Sebastian Aristotelis, it was a rare chance to mix science with showmanship. ‘Nick is a difficult client, but one the best clients,’ he says. ‘He likes to take risks. He wanted it to be wilder, so we went through ten iterations of the design.’

The whole structure weighs in at just over a tonne, with the hefty speakers counterbalancing the long cantilevered ‘container’ at the front of the Spaceshop. ‘We wanted to keep it honest and raw, with the discoloration of the welding marks,’ says Aristotelis, who explains that the form was inspired by the idea of a separate container and engine unit coming together.

‘Running a company is like conducting an orchestra,’ Tidball tells me. ‘It’s like having a symphony in your head.’ This particular project spans disciplines, genres and scales quite unlike many other so-called ‘creative collaborations’, with an organic drive and authenticity at its heart.

Tidball’s own background hints at the origins of these grand gestures. After studying architecture at Newcastle, then at the Bartlett under Peter Cook, he went into advertising (as did Steve), overseeing big statement projects like Airbnb’s floating house. ‘I’m happy that we’ve practised doing clothes for eight years so that we can have a project like this – it’s what I personally believe is the future of retail.’

Funnily enough, the project brings to mind another iconic Danish brand (one that also has a Bjarke Ingels connection). In 1978, Lego introduced its first space-themed sets, including the 918 Space Transport. Suddenly, construction pieces like cones, cylinders and sirens took on other meanings, repurposed as rock parts, thrusters and boosters.

Vollebak’s Spaceshop is akin to a giant Lego set, demonstrating the power of play and imagination at work, all pointing to a future that’s both unknown and endlessly intriguing.

Vollebak.com, @Vollebak

Bang-Olufsen.com, @BangOlufsen

Saga.dk, @Saga_Space_Architects